Who

Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death

A few years ago Valve rolled out their “Steam”
service, a form of direct download for their
games. The idea behind Steam is that when you want to buy a game, you pay
money for the right to buy a game, and Steam downloads it to your hard drive,
no CD involved. It’s more than just an online purchase, because Steam is doing
some sort of authentication to try to avoid piracy. There are lots of services
like this now (Stardock’s totalgaming.net service, and direct2drive, for
example). You can think of Steam as being an attempt to make something like
iTunes for AAA games.

I tried it out at the time and gave it my key for the original Half-Life,
which I had bought at retail. I was fairly put off, mostly because the Steam
application is such a sham and a travesty – it’s one of those Windows
facehuggerware programs. It starts itself up automatically on a reboot, it
opens dialog boxes at inconvenient times, and worst of all – this should be a
firing squad offense, by the way – when you click the “Quit” button it
minimizes to your taskbar and puts up a dialog box telling you “I didn’t
really quit! I hate you and I hate freedom! Tee-hee!” I more or less ignored
the broader debate going on about Steam: it was clear to me that anyone who
didn’t like it must be right, because it was so obviously bad. The broader
debate, it seems, focused what it means to “purchase” a game. The “Out of the
Box Experience” for Half-Life 2 was apparently terrible, because of Steam. You
would go into a store and pay them real money for a sticker with an activation
key and a real CD, which apparently contained a 20kb Steam installer and a few
hundred megabytes of porn. Then you would wait for 36 hours while Steam
actually downloaded the real application, browsing the porn while you waited.
Eventually, the servers would time out, the download would fail, and you shot
yourself. This is why everyone who enjoyed Half-Life 2 played it on the Xbox.

This install procedure, purportedly, was traumatic enough that I could imagine
it permanently scarring anyone who went through it. I don’t know; I didn’t buy
Half-Life 2 because my computer at the time wasn’t expensive enough. I believe
psu did, however, which would explain why, when I told him I was writing this
post, he gently reminded me that anyone who says anything nice about Steam is
his mortal enemy.

The other day a publisher set me up with a CD key for use with Steam to review
a game. So I downloaded Steam onto my Windows box, and started it up.
Incredibly, I remembered my username and password. And there, waiting for me,
was a menu item with all of the old Half-Life games that I had registered
with it.

Now, you need to understand the context here: I am not what you would call an
organized person. I lose games. I lose CDs. I lose those little goddamn
stickers with the CD key on them. If you held a gun to my head and asked me
where in my house the Half-Life discs are, I would not be able to answer
you. So for Steam to have remembered this for me and made it possible for me
to play these games again, on a new computer, by just clicking a button seems
to me exactly the sort of wonderful thing that technology should be doing.